A slightly dirty Martini is sitting within arms reach as I attempt to conjure up the sequence of events that occurred during our first week of reopening. You get the popcorn.
So needless to say with 3 months to prepare for reopening I thought I was ready for every possible scenario. Monday, June 22 couldn’t come soon enough. I cleaned, organized, and stocked my shelves with not only PPE, but, everything I needed to perform hair color, Keratin Treatments, permanent waves, and retail products.
We have had many meetings at the hair salon before reopening to practice our new protocol now that we have to adhere to a ten-person capacity, escorting clients in, temperature checks, waivers, and extra sanitation steps. We really were prepared. We thought.
Monday morning came and it was like the first day of school. I was nervous I would forget something like when I was in high school and you feared to forget your locker number or combination.
Everything was definitely more complicated! For the first four hours of the day on Monday I hoped with repetition, it would become more comfortable and flow, and it did!
Until I smelled burning rubber, like when your belt on the vacuum gets something stuck, it was the clothes dryer!
With Kirsten, Dennis, and I COMPLETELY booked for over twelve hours the wash was mounting, and my twenty-year-old stackable Kenmore bit the dust. Our assistant took the towels to the closest laundromat. We also resorted to hanging them outback. They dried crunchy. We frantically called a local appliance store and John came to the rescue by picking it up, removing the old one, and installed the new one. Dennis was a great help too, until he tripped, and caught the dryer before it fell, scrapping up his legs. He never missed a beat, he worked with bandaids the rest of the night.
As the night winded down to an end I realized we went through a week's worth of color in one day! Everyone’s roots were so long we were using extra color! We normally have one to two orders a week, this week we had SIX! Remember, this is still only Monday by the way. How can it be that one of the orders gets sent to my billing address (HOME) not the hair salon? Thank God my sales reps took good care of me this week, and everything came in as needed. Oh, how did I forget to mention the mainline to the front desk was down. Verizon came to the salon eight days in a row BEFORE we opened and couldn’t fix it. In the meanwhile, all calls were forwarded to my cell. No second line to roll over to, on the busiest week I have ever seen in 40 years of being in this industry. It was like the Christmas season on steroids. It was fixed this Wednesday (eye roll).
Last, but not least, our first week back coincided with our number one assistant’s vacation week that was planned last year before COVID19 was even a thing. To top off all the chaos we were short-handed so my dear friend Kim and Kirsten’s twin sister Nicole helped get us through the week! We have a new girl, Ashley starting this week!
With all of the craziness I mentioned above, I must say we have never been busier! We are a small salon and we extended our hours to get everyone in and even though it was a week of long days we each averaged 78 to 80 hours this workweek. Because of that, we are able to take off for the Fourth of July and recharge. Fireworks are needed.
We want to thank everyone for their support this last week. I want to share with you that no matter what obstacle came at us this week our team persevered and we triumphed like never before. For that, I am blessed and very grateful.
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